Orlando

Reviews

"Simonds’ sonnets are uncaged, snarling, rooting creatures, ferreting about the mind like it’s a shoebox of memorabilia. These sonnets execute that mysterious task which only poems can: expose the connective roots of memories, objects, and beings, despite how dissonant the universe can feel."—Publishers Weekly

"How do you write poems while caring for children, teaching composition, and trying to make rent? How do you think about—for example—domestic violence, Bikram Yoga, and being in love, all at once? The world is an exhausting place full of unsustainable contradictions; the sonnet holds some parts of it uncomfortably, energetically, together."—Boston Review

"Steal It Back will not let us forget our own complicity in building a soulless society. The juxtaposition of priceless works of art with our shoddy, big-box store culture generates an anger that is the book’s main power. Simonds’s style is direct, her sentences both sharp-edged and fragile in their rawness."—Miami Rail

Orlando represents an incredible feat of poetic prowess by its breadth and by its representations of place, person, and truth. The book explores the most human moments of the systems within which we live—systems that layer, stack, take on new meanings. We are reminded of tragedy, violence, and sadness. Systems bring us interlocking moments of emotion, thought, and reaction. A microcosmic muse in a bubble of tropical noise, Orlando becomes a sequence that shatters with the breathing of a poet who has been broken but survives, a poet who accepts mutation of and transgression toward self."
—Greg Bem, Rain Taxi

"Simonds employs her signature breathless momentum to great advantage, deciphering what connects people and how those connections can keep a person going even against his or her will. She entwines recollections of an unresolved relationship and the multifarious abuses of love with notions of the precarity of the present. But this is not a sob story; the poems exhibit self-awareness as they shift forward at furious speed. . . . An affecting collection that both befits and transcends its namesake city."
—Publishers Weekly

"Relentless as a fever-dream. . . . Sandra Simonds’s Orlando moves intensely, nimbly, and with exacting intention. It recasts place, as well as the stories of the past and present, and the speaker who tells."
—The Arkansas International

"These are fast, exciting poems—they inject complex sinuous sentences with something approximating the hectic teenage aesthetic of the internet, where everything is immediate, brightly colored, unbearably intense, referentially-inclined (but with an ever-diminishing attachment to a referent), maybe a joke, deadly serious."
—Kirsten Ihns, Chicago Review

"The poetry here is so brutal in its language and so delicate in its form, the reader splits in half and bleeds everywhere. There was so much here to like—an epic poem (or two) that weaves through landscape, past lovers, and trauma; framed by impassioned renderings of the feminine experience as well as different iterations of Orlando (ie: as a person, past lover, City, Virginia Woolf, etc). A Fiery Work of Art!"
—Jared Levin, City Lights Bookseller

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